1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a motion capture method for easily composing a humanoid character on a real background image, and more particularly, to a method that can accurately match a humanoid character to a real background image by installing cameras for motion capture on-site (outdoors or in a studio) to capture a real background image, and obtaining the correlation between fixed cameras and cameras for capturing the real background image prior to performing motion capturing of the humanoid character for composition, in order to capture 3D motion data.
The present invention is based on a portion of research performed in the IT New Growth Engine Core Technology Development Project, a collaborative effort of the Ministry of Information and Communication of the Republic of Korea and the Institute for Information Technology Advancement, entitled “Development of Realistic Digital Image Contents Production Software”, Filing No. 2005-S-003-02.
2. Description of the Related Art
Methods of generating motion data for humanoid characters in the related art include wearing infrared reflectors or emitters, ultrasound generators, magnetic sensors, fiber optics, etc. on regions of appendage joints, and reproducing 3D positions of sensors.
This method uses markers or sensors attached to joints to detect 3D positions of the joints, so that accurate capture of a character's motion data is possible; however, because the method is not linked to an integrated background image, a substantial amount of editing must be performed on the captured data in order to allow interaction by the character with a real object or another character. Thus, much time must be spent in the composition process.
Also, in a method of extracting background geometric data by tracking a camera against a background image, while there is a way to extract a 3D geometric structure of a prop in a real background, generation of motion capture data with respect to a human form is not possible.
Therefore, because motion capture and capture of a real background image is performed separately in the related art, it is difficult to integrate a character (to which motion capture data is applied) with a real background. Especially when there is interaction with a prop or a third party, much manual work is required, thus consuming much time for composition.